S Loo

Eating (with) Insects: Insect Gastronomies and Upside-Down Ethics

Insects are uninvited guests at our tables – hovering nearby, crawling on our food or already inside our guts. While we humans come together to talk and eat, insects are also with us in other ways: thoughts buzz, skin crawls; we have butterflies in our stomachs and ants in our pants. These scenes are of interest, both because of the relations that are struck up between insect and human worlds and because of the way insects imaginatively figure many of the affects and instincts mobilized when we gather about the table.

A PICTURE BOOK OF INVISIBLE WORLDS: semblances of insects and humans in jakob von uexküll's laboratory

Dorion Sagan observes that pioneering ethologist Jakob von Uexküll tends to be read in contrasting ways, as a “humble naturalist” pre-empting current research in biosemiotics, animal perception and agency; and as a “biologist-shaman,” gesturing to a transcendental realm where the life-worlds of animals interconnect in a vast symphony of nature. In both cases the tools of the laboratory are thought to generate complete pictures of the invertebrates that Uexküll studies, in unity with their environments. As Giorgio Agamben points out, these experiments form part of an abstract mechanism that produces the human, by isolating instinctual life as an object for study and management from social and ethical modes of existence. What these readings neglect to consider is that Uexküll imagines his experiments through a Picture Book frame. We argue that for Uexküll there is always something fabulous and child-like about the enterprise of reconstructing the subjective environments of the small animals he works with. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, we propose the Picture Book as a particular technics, or tertiary memory, that cultivates modes of attention that are associated with childhood and are open to the emergence of partial objects and relations. Considered through the Picture Book frame, the Umwelten of insects and other small animals are no longer fixed but are drawn and redrawn in partial expressive ways, through the uncanny picturing – or what Brian Massumi would call “semblances” – of different configurations of animal, technology, human relations. By considering the Picture Book as a technic for ecological thought and imagination, our paper will explore how the small creatures that Uexküll describes might enable the emergence of new ethical sensibilities and relations.

Insect affects: the big and small of the entomological imagination in childhood

Abstract Drawing on a scene in J.M.G. Le Clézios novel Terra Amata, which tells the story of the instincts of a small boy, the minute sensoria of some bugs and a cosmic catastrophe, this essay demonstrates the ambivalence around insects in animal studies, their contingent location in psychoanalysis and the conundrums they place in ethical philosophy. By reading Le Clézios tale through Uexküll, Freud, Dodds and Stengers we argue for more nuanced, imbricated and critical connections between ethology, psychoanalysis and ethics. These connections become imperatives in the face of the current environmental crisis, where we urgently need to attend to co-affecting relations that are too distant or proximate, tiny or vast to register as familiar sentient states or ethical feelings. In the process we demonstrate the performative dimensions of what we call the entomological imagination – present in the strange proximity of child and bugs, the powerful unthinking god, the indifference of the insects to human commands, and the infinitesimal catastrophe in Le Clézios story – that facilitates an epistemic fluidity required for a contemporary understanding of ecologies.

Insects and other minute perceptions in the Baroque House

In a fold on the plateau, stands a house with two floors. The house once belonged to a philosopher, long dead, whose work was said to be as Baroque as the decorations of his house.

Emergent Molarities: Resistances on the Molecular Plane of Biology and Digital Architecture

The appropriations of biology in digital architectural design, particularly genetic models for the emergence of form, tend towards the molecular, whereby emergence is given by discrete forms in relation. This paper argues for the reconsideration of the biological paradigm in architecture from the point of view of molarity, in which relations between entities are experienced as relations that are in themselves actual abstract extensions. Drawing on the work of two philosophers whose thinking has been influential in Deleuze and Guattaris molecular materialist philosophy, namely Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon, this paper identifies the status of actual molar concretisations of relations in the form of codes, diagrams and material traces of processes, and the transduction of information through these molar forms, in the ontogenetic processes of individuation of human beings and technological machines alike.